Rhyme And Reason Of Hip-hop's Popularity

Movies - REVIEW - `5 Sides of a Coin'

The problem with rap documentaries is always a question of audience -- as in, "Who do you expect to see it?"

Is it for hip-hop aficionados, the way films such as Freestyle, Scratch and The Show were? Or is it for outsiders, offering a peek inside Hip-Hop Nation for the Too Old-It's-Too-Loud crowd?

An important question, seeing how rap has circled the planet and pretty much displaced rock 'n' roll as the voice of youth culture.

The Canadian Paul Kell's 5 Sides of a Coin is a primer on hip-hop history, an overview of hip-hop's breadth and a breakdown of hip-hop's component parts. It's broad and not particularly deep, with throwaway moments and too many insider "experts" pushing his or her version of the history or the definitions of hip-hop terms.

It's hip-hop with training wheels, for people who think "plain or peanut" when they hear the stage name of Marshall Mathers.

5 Sides separates the music -- rap -- from the aesthetic phenomenon, hip-hop. It tells you where the term "hip-hop" came from. Kell found people who leapt from the "aerosol culture" of graffiti painting in New York to the boombox street parties and rap of the '70s. He traces the origins of the music to jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron (pretty much incoherent in an interview), and to the Jamaican native Kool Herc, who invented rapping and most of the slang that goes with it.

Kell travels the world to demonstrate the hip-hop Diaspora, and treats us to the sound of a German kid slamming rhymes and filling his English with the telltale "YouknowwhutI'msayin'?"

And Kell traces the histories of "emcees" (rappers), and "turntablists," the first DJs, guys who invented scratching and turned turntables into a music art. He drops in on "beatboxin'" shows, guys who use just a microphone to mimic scratching records to the big beat.

Doing all this in 70 minutes makes it superficial, at best. But 5 Sides is a decent enough intro to the music many of us spend our time avoiding. And if it takes you to Scratch, Rhyme & Reason, Biggie and Tupac and Freestyle, the many earlier and superior docs on this still-evolving music, at least you'll be able to have a short music conversation with any 14-year-old b-boy who comes along.